


your memory keeps me alive (and reeling)

by TheSongOfTheCricket



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 07:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4737440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSongOfTheCricket/pseuds/TheSongOfTheCricket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You can eat my cookies and read on your own bed, you know,” Laura says, turning around in her chair to face her. For a moment, Carmilla looks up and sees her there, giving her the signature you’re-so-lucky-I-love-you grin, complete with the raised eyebrows and slight curve of her lip. She prepares to fire back with a comment about spending plenty of time in Laura’s bed, when she freezes. Because suddenly, it’s not Laura she’s looking at anymore. It’s another girl with sad eyes, a small frown, and a tiny mole next to her nose.</p><p>Ell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sinking

**Author's Note:**

> this is a gift(-ish?) for the-magic-of-fiction on tumblr. it's cute.

She’s lying back on Laura’s bed, gnawing on a cookie she nabbed from her earlier. She knows it irritates Laura a tiny bit when she steals her snacks, and maybe that was part of the allure. It certainly helps that Laura herself tastes like chocolate chip cookies, and with the sugary little orb in her hand, she was able to stay on the other side of the room as Laura tried to work on some silly school thing. To distract herself further, she pulls out an already well read novel, flipping to a random point and reading from there.

“You can eat my cookies and read on your own bed, you know,” Laura says, turning around in her chair to face her. For a moment, Carmilla looks up and sees her there, giving her the signature you’re-so-lucky-I-love-you grin, complete with the raised eyebrows and slight curve of her lip. She prepares to fire back with a comment about spending plenty of time in Laura’s bed, when she freezes. Because suddenly, it’s not Laura she’s looking at anymore. It’s another girl with sad eyes, a small frown, and a tiny mole next to her nose.

Ell.

Carmilla doesn’t even realize she’s fallen of the bed until Laura’s leaning over her, staring at her from an odd angle and saying her name.

* * *

Laura’s freaking out, big time. Her girlfriend has fallen of the bed, and while she’s physically uninjured, Laura’s not so sure about her mental state. Instead of giving her a small smirk and a witty retort, she sat upright and pulled her knees to her chest. Laura’s tried everything to try and coax words from her, but Carmilla stays silent, eyes pressed shut.

Eventually, Laura does the only thing she can think off. She engulfs her girlfriend in an odd sort of embrace; surrounding her with her knees as she rests her chin on Carmilla’s shoulder, feeling the other girl pressing her forehead against the side of her neck. She didn’t notice either of their breathing slowing down, until their slumped against each other, both of them having drifted off into quiet slumber.

* * *

When Laura wakes up, she’s lying in her own bed, facing the wall. At first, she doesn’t find anything odd, but then she feels the wet collar of her t-shirt against her skin, and she remembers earlier almost instantly. She shoots up in bed, turned her head to find Carmilla perched on the other bed, staring at her with unblinking eyes.

“Hi,” Laura says, so brightly she winces, before correcting herself and speaking again, much calmer. “Sorry, I mean, uh, hi.”

A small smile tugs at the corner of Camilla’s lips, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Jesus, Laura, calm down.”

Laura smiles back, but she notices the substitution of her real name in place of a nickname. It stirs a worry in her, and she’s biting her bottom lip before she can stop herself. She knows the nicknames are a fondness-type thing, and Carmilla only discards them when she’s feeling particularly upset. “Do you, um, wanna talk about it?”

“Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p’ sound at the end as she falls backwards unto her sheets. Laura can tell Carmilla’s pretending nothing’s wrong for her benefit, and she’s both touched and terrified. However, she decides to let it go for now, to ask her about it tomorrow.

However, she can’t help but be a little distracted when Carmilla pulls out the box of cookies and offers it out to her, like some sort of peace treaty, as if she thinks Laura’s offended.

She’s not; just worried. But she does appreciate the cookies.

* * *

Carmilla’s chin is resting is resting on Laura’s shoulder, her arm draped across the girl’s waist. Her breathing has been steady and even for a long time, maybe three or four hours, but Carmilla isn’t really sure. The only thing she really knows is that she’s still awake; she has been the whole time Laura’s been snoring softly. Tonight, they’re curled up on top of Carmilla’s sheet, because Laura has taken a fondness to jumping between which bed she likes to sleep in. Laura likes her own bed well enough, but she also claims that Carmilla’s bed smells like her, so tonight, that was her pick.

For now, though, Carmilla doesn’t really care which bed she’s in. She’s just glad Laura’s fallen asleep, because if she wasn’t, then she’d be asking Carmilla why she’d suddenly stiffened up. But the older girl’s positive she’s the only one seeing this right now, and she doesn’t want to see the pity in Laura right now.

Because what she sees right now is Ell, standing in the aisle between the beds, giving her a disapproving look.

Staring at the girl, her nightgown billowing in the invisible wind, Carmilla begins to feel nausea bloom in the pit of her stomach. She knows what she has to do, and she knows she has to, no matter how much she doesn’t want to. But she knows something big is starting, and she knows Laura isn’t safe if she stays.

She presses her face into Laura’s hair, draped across her cheeks, squeezing her eyes shut and taking a deep breath. Laura smells like hot chocolate and cookies, and it’s so beautiful it makes her heart and her nose ache. She never wants to forget that smell, the way Laura smells like no one else does.

“I love you,” she murmurs, the tip of her nose still pressed to Laura’s cheek. She can feel the dimples in her face pull back slightly, and she knows the girl is sleeping. Carmilla panics for a moment, before calming down as she realizes Laura’s still asleep. As much as she doesn’t want to admit it, it’s a good thing. If she was awake, she’d beg and plead for Camilla to stay, until she finally did.

Disentangling herself from the girl is painful, almost as hard as watching Ell get led to death. But the difference is now she’s doing what’s right, whereas Maman was doing what was wrong. Still, she can’t help but imagine what Laura’s going to feel like in the morning, and she feels so much like her mother that she wants to scream and cry and punch the wall, but she stays silent as she pulls herself to her feet.

It’s like her head clears up a bit the second she’s free of the bed, and it’s enough to remind that she’s doing the right thing, the good thing. The painful thing. There are tears welling in her eyes, but she pushes them back down because vampires don’t cry, _vampires don’t cry_. Her eyes are apparently as rebellious as she was, because a few slip down her cheeks before she can stop them, and it makes it harder again.

Still, she forges on, making every excruciating step to the tiny kitchen, opening the mini-fridge and pulling out the soy milk container and taking a swig, before opening a cupboard next to the fridge and rooting around. Her fingers close around Laura’s favorite travel mug, and she pulls it out and into the dim light coming from the moon outside. It’s got a bowtie on it, and some silly caption that Carmilla doesn’t really understand. She’s never really cared for it before, but lifting it to her nose, she can smell the hot chocolate scent wafting from mug that hundreds of washings could never really get out. Before she fully recognizes what she’s doing, she’s unscrewing the lid and pouring blood into it. She doesn’t know how long it’ll be until she get blood again, and she may as well take it; there’s no way in hell Laura’s gonna drink it. She drains the rest of blood from the container, before dropping it on the ground. She swallows it down like you would your first glass of alcohol, screws the lid back on the mug, before placing it back on the container and reaching for the magnetic grocery list and pen.

She uncaps the pen, and begins to write. Tears began to blur her vision as she scrawled words across the paper. “Vampires don’t cry,” she hissed to herself. “Stop crying. _Stop crying!”_

By the time she had finished, a couple of tears had managed to find their way onto the paper. She considered rewriting it, but Laura began to make soft noises in her sleep, and Carmilla knows that means she’s about to wake up and she has to go, or Laura’s going to wake up and it'll all be over. She moves to the window, when something yellow in the corner of her eye caught her attention. It’s Laura’s pillow.

Carmilla’s walking over and reaching for it before she could stop herself, pulling it close to her and burying her face into the fluff. It smells like Laura: hot chocolate and cookies.

Laura mumbles something in her sleep, and it reminds Carmilla that she has to go, now. She runs over to the window, prying it open and grabbing the travel mug. She’s so caught up in running, in fleeing, that it never even occurs to her to drop the pillow; instead, she just takes it with her as she jumps out the window.

As she runs, she can only smell Laura: hot chocolate and cookies.

* * *

Laura wakes up and she’s cold.

It takes her a moment to realize that Carmilla isn’t wrapped around her, and that’s probably why. It’s the cold that propels her from the bed, and that’s when she notices the window is open, which is most likely the reason she feels like her room has turned into a freezer. She crosses the room and intends pulls the window closed. She didn’t sleep that long; it’s still a bit dark outside, but she’s well-rested enough to notice the piece of paper on the counter. It strikes an odd feeling in her, and she slowly reaches out to grab it, feeling strangely afraid as she completely forgets about the window.

She’s pulling it to her face, eyes beginning to scan the paper. There’s no signature at the bottom, so she just begins to read, seeing as how it’s addressed to her. The letter is short, barely two paragraphs, but it’s just so _Carmilla_ she doesn’t even need a signature to know.

She doesn’t even realize she’s sinking to the ground until she’s pressing her face into her knees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry, did i say cute? i meant cut. as in cut out your soul, like i did for this fic.


	2. The Art Of Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> where the dimwit squad + kirsch do their best to pick up the pieces of laura and put her back together, but there's nobody left to help carmilla do the same

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> otherwise known as the one where laura goes from news reporting journalist to causal vlogger.

The first one to find her is LaFontaine.

They’re coming by to ask Laura about something, doing their usual just-barge-in act, when they noticed the unusual silence. That’s when they look over and notice Laura, curled up on the floor with a folded up piece of people by her head and an empty soy milk carton clutched to her chest.

LaFontaine, not knowing what to do, calls Perry. The next three days are basically spent trying to get Laura to respond to anything: stupid jokes, brownies, Doctor Who, but all she’ll do is curl up on Carmilla’s bed and cry.

Everyone is slowly paraded through the dorm room to see Laura, as if she were a dying relative in the ICU. Everyone has their various methods of trying to cheer her up: Perry makes endless batches of brownies and hot chocolate that Laura barely touches, LaFontaine babbles on about Biochemistry, Danny encourages her to badmouth Carmilla in an attempt to get over her, and Kirsch sits around trying to make her laugh.

* * *

As it turns out, Kirsch is the most successful.

Laura had been sitting on Carmilla’s bed, one of the vampire’s blankets, wrapped around her shoulders because even though the room was becoming increasingly colder, Laura refused to close the window.

“You know,” he said, tossing a hacky-sack up and down in the air as he spun around in her desk chair. “The Zetas are having a party on Saturday. You should come. We all miss you, little nerd hottie.”

He stops spinning when he catches a glimpse of her face, thinking he’s hallucinating. He’s not. There, on Laura’s face, is the ghost of a smile.

“Oh my god, is that smile?”

And then, she’s actually grinning at him, and he can’t help but feel a mix of relief, elation, and pride.

“Yes!” he shouts to the ceiling, throwing his head back and fists into the air. “Laura Hollis is smiling at me! Laura Hollis is _smiling_ at me!”

He doesn’t think it could get any better when it does. She starts to snicker, and his eyes widen because he can’t really fathom how he got her to go from crying to cracking up in less than four hours.

And then, he’s laughing and she's laughing, and they’re both a fit of happiness, of smiles and laughter for no other reason than that for one second, they’re _happy._

Kirsch knows this won’t last (it doesn’t, of course; it never does), that her giggles will dissipate into silence and her grins will disappear back into that same vacant frown she always seems to wear these days, but he can’t help but be glad for this moment, this one moment where she was doubled over in gasps of air not because she was sobbing, but because she was laughing.

* * *

The tires squeech as she speeds down the highway, music blaring so loud you could hear it practically a mile away.

At this point, she’s glad for the sharpened vampire eyesight, because there’s enough tears in her eyes to crash the car three times over.

* * *

Everybody has long since stopped saying Carmilla’s name, ever since they realized that every single time they do, Laura flinches away, as if the very name pinches her flesh.

Carmilla is reduced down to a ‘her’ or a ‘she’ from that point on, or at least whenever they’re around Laura.

* * *

It’s a particularly quiet day for Laura with all of them gathered in her room, carrying on their best attempts at normal conversations in hopes of coaxing some sort of comfort into her. And it’s during this in which LaFontaine turns to her and asks about the yellow pillow.

“She took it with her, I think,” the brunette mumbles, holding the remaining pillow against her chest as she rests her chin on it.

“Really?” Danny growls. There’s a snarl on her face and an outrage to the way she speaks, as if it were her own pillow that was stolen. “Not only did she climb out of your window in the middle of the night, but she takes your pillow with her?”

Laura winces at her words, clutching tighter to the pillow. “Danny-” she murmurs, but her words go unnoticed as Danny keeps ranting. 

“I mean, not only does she leave you, but she steals your goddam pillow? That’s low-” 

“Danny-” she tries again, raising her voice. Laura can feel her back stiffening, see the name on Danny’s lips and she tenses. 

“-even for Carmilla-” 

_“Danny!”_

She’s shouting now, and she never shouts, but it’s enough to get Danny to shut up about her and it’s a relief, it really is. 

“I’m sorry, I-”

“Get out,” she says, her voice firm, firmer than it’s been since she left. 

“Laura, I-” 

_“Get out!”_ she cries, pressing her hands to the side of her head as if she can make the sudden pounding stop, as if she can stop her voice from echoing her mind, and she’s not sure who she’s yelling at anymore. 

Danny looks upset with herself, but she leaves in silence, LaFontaine and Perry on her heels. Only Kirsch stays, and its only seconds before she’s burying her face in his shirt and beginning to bawl.

* * *

It takes longer than an entire week after her disappearance for Laura to be able to drag herself across the room and close the window. 

It feels as if she’s physically closing her out, and it hurts. God, it hurts so much, but when she turns around and sees Kirsch smiling at her, that proud dopey grin on his face, she can feel it hurting just a little bit less.

* * *

It’s been a week and a half now, and Laura’s improving, really. She’s smiling a lot more, and even though it doesn’t quite light up her eyes the way it used to, it’s a start all the same. In the daytime, she’s slowly slipping back into herself, and everybody can see it. Kirsch is proud of her, even if it all seems to change back at night.

He thinks it’s a little ironic, really, because before she was refusing to let him stay to protect her as a Zeta ‘dudescort’, but now she’s begging him to stay at night because she’s afraid to be alone. 

Carmilla may be gone, but Laura still sees her in every single shadow.

* * *

It’s three weeks after she leaves that Laura actually draws up the nerve to sit down in front of the camera again. 

“Hello, to anyone who might still be watching,” Laura says. “I honestly didn’t think I’d be back to this anytime soon, but journalism can be quite therapeutic, and I think I need it at this point.”

She blabbers on for a little while, trying to carefully tiptoe around the subject of her, when she realizes she can’t avoid it anytime soon. People will start to notice her absence. It isn’t like the clothes or the bed sheets; she can’t just shove it in a closet and pretend she never existed. 

“Some of you may wonder where Carmilla is,” she says, nearly stumbling over the name. It’s been so long since she’s said, the syllables seem funny in her mouth, like tin, and for a second she swears she can’t breathe, but it’s only a second. “She’s, well… She’s gone.” She actually has to stop for a couple of moments, because tears are staring to form in her eyes and she doesn’t want to cry, at least not yet, but see manages to recover after less than half a minute. “She left a note and climbed out the window.”

There’s silence in the air, because she’s already stopping to gather her bearings back up yet again as the tears begin to flow down her cheeks, completely out of her control. She’s reaching for the crumpled paper on her desk before she can stop herself, unfolding it and glancing up at the computer once before she turns back to the note.

“Dear Laura,” she reads, her voice shaking. “I’m sorry. I know you’ll hate me for this, but I have to go. Something’s coming. I’m just trying to protect you. Please don't try and find me; you won't. I love you.” 

She places the note back on the desk, and stares at the webcam for a second, her lip quivering, before curling her knees to her chest. 

She cuts the video off only seconds before the sobbing starts.

* * *

Kirsch tells her that she doesn’t have to put the video up. 

“No,” she replies. “I think I do.”

* * *

She checks all the time. How could she not?

Only today, it’s different. There’s actually a video this time: a new one. She’s clicking it before she can stop herself, and her breath catches the second Laura’s face pops up on screen. 

_ “Hello to anyone who might still be watching.”  _

She barely breathes the entire video, because she honestly doesn’t even really need to, and by the end of the video, she’s crying nearly as hard as Laura.

* * *

Laura’s taken aback by the amount of support that both she and the video receive; she didn’t even think that many people were still checking. But her inbox is blowing up with people telling her to stay strong, that she’s better off without Carmilla.

She’s not so sure herself, but Laura can’t help but feel a little more like old self every time she turns the camera back on and greets the internet. 

For now, there aren’t crazy shenanigans going on Silas, or at least none that she knows of, but that doesn’t stop her from recording. Instead, she talks about other things, tells funny stories she hears, and brings a friend on every once and a while, although that’s mostly just Kirsch, because he has a tendency to randomly show up when she starts a video.

It’s a slow process, rebuilding herself, but a month and a half after Carmilla and she’s beginning to feel like she did at the beginning of the first semester.

* * *

She never got another roommate; she didn’t want one. But at this point, the other twin bed in her room may as well just belong to Kirsch. After all, he’s sleeping there almost every night. Laura never actually read her student handbook, but she’s pretty sure there’s a rule in there about boys and girls sleeping in the same room. However, in the wake of everything’s that’s happened, between recovering the missing girls and the death of the Dean, either nobody notices or they don’t care.

Sometimes it makes Laura feel bad; she’s talking up so much of his time during the day, and now she’s stealing his time at night, too. However, her fear overpowers her sympathy when she wakes in the middle of the night, inches from screaming as both tears and sweat drip down her face.

* * *

Laura’s scrolling through the fan questions in her email inbox when she sees one that makes her laugh so hard the milk she’s drinking comes flying out her nose and even that can’t make her stop.

_‘Are you and Kirsch dating_?’ it asks.

Kirsch, who’s standing in the little kitchen as he probes her cupboards for something to eat, looks up at the sound of her giggling. He asks her what’s so funny, but she’s laughing so hard she can’t speak, so she just beckons him over and points to the screen. 

Pretty soon, they’re both cracking up, and they’re still laughing even as Laura falls out of her chair.

* * *

After Kirsch leaves for a Zeta meeting and she can go five minutes with bursting into laughter again, she types out a quick _‘no, we’re just friends_ ’, and walks off to rummage around for cookies in hopes that Kirsch didn’t eat them all. 

When she steps back to the computer a handful of minutes later, there’s already a new e-mail in her inbox; a response to the one she just sent. It’s short, but it’s enough to make her heart stop for a moment. 

_‘Good.’_

It’s a single word, nothing that should concern her too much, but it’s so short and the word is enough to seem… _possessive_. Maybe it’s ridiculous, and most would call her out for jumping to conclusions, but there’s no doubt in her mind. 

Laura shuts of her computer and instead of posting a video two or three days later, like usual, it’s a whole week before she makes another video.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm still sorry.


	3. An Empty Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which laura backslides and has to claw her way back up that hill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ze last installment

Kirsch notices something change a bit in Laura; she seems a little more easily irritated, a little more jumpy, but it’s obvious she’s trying to hide it, so he tries not to pry.

But she’s crying more at night, and it’s louder and she’s thrashing, and he’s trying really hard to not to get into her business, but he’s so worried.

And he doesn’t know if he should try and help her or let her handle it herself, but he knows that if it doesn’t stop soon he isn’t going to have a choice.

* * *

It’s been three days since her last video when there’s a soft knock on her door. The sound seems so odd to Laura, after becoming accustomed to having her friends just barge in, and it takes her a moment to respond.

“Come in,” she calls, and when she turns around in her desk chair, she’s more than a bit surprised to see Danny standing there, although in hindsight, she probably shouldn’t have been

“Hi,” she says, nearly standing out of her chair before quickly deciding against it.

“I just wanted to apologize,” the taller girl responds, hunched against the door frame with her hands shoved in her pockets. “For what I was saying about Carmilla. It wasn’t cool and-"

“I don’t want to talk about her right now,” Laura interrupts, swiveling back around to come face-to-face with her blank computer screen once more.

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she mumbles, but Danny can tell that it really isn’t, that _Laura_ isn’t.

* * *

She doesn’t know why she wrote it, but now, after having the time to actually think about it, she knows it was a terrible idea, one of her worst in this century.

She didn’t even think about it until after she hit send. Sure, it was only a single word, but Laura’s a smart girl, and reading back over it, it looks wrong, standing alone, isolated from the rest of the text. It sounds controlling, creepily so.

It sounds like her mother.

* * *

“Hey Laura,” Kirsch says cautiously, sitting down on Carmilla’s old bed, or what they referred to as the ‘other bed’ now. Laura makes a sort of humming sound in acknowledgement instead of turning around, a cue for him to keep talking while she continues to type against the keyboard

“I’m worried,” he says, and immediately, the typing stops and her attention turns solely onto him. He can she’s tensing from the way the chair shifts as her back straightens, and when she speaks, her voice is stiff and the response is automatic.

“I’m fine.”

But fine never really means fine, and anybody around Laura over these past two months could tell you that.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says, and it comes out sad rather than accusatory or angry. “You’re crying out more in sleep, and you’re squirming and sometimes yelling. I can tell it’s getting worse. _Why?_ ”

“I’m fine,” she repeats, and it sounds more like a plea, like she’s trying to convince herself as well as him. Kirsch sighs, running a hand through his short hair. He can feel it, feel her pulling away and retreating back into herself, and it makes his chest ache to watch.

“I’m going to the Zeta meeting, and then I don’t know,” he says, scooping up his gym bag as he gets to his feet and walks away. “If you need me, come find me.”

The closing of the door is soft but to Laura it sounds endlessly loud, echoing in her head and she feels like she’s going to start crying all over again.

“I’m fine,” she whispers to the empty room.

Even the walls feel like they don’t believe her.

* * *

Laura curses at herself for letting this _one little word_ get to her this much.

It’s not a big deal, she tries to tell herself, but she can’t even think the words without knowing they’re wrong. Nobody might think so, but she does, because she knows. She knows what this word means, knows who it came from, and she hates it. Hates that feeling of nobody else being ablke to understand, like she were a teenager in high school again.

But she can feel it, eating her alive, and it’s a horrid feeling and all she knows is she wants it to _stop,_ to just _go away_.

She’s still not sure if he’ll understand as she breezes out the door, but Laura starts making her way to the campus gym anyways.

* * *

It’s late by the time she gets to the gym, already a little past ten, and when she pushes her way through the doors, she heads straight to the back of the gym and into the boxing room, a tiny room nestled in the corner that doesn’t get much student traffic, especially at on a Saturday night when there’s plenty of sleep to catch up on or parties to hit up. So when she gets there, she isn’t all that surprised to find the place empty.

Except for Kirsch, that is.

He’s roaring in anger as he wrecks havoc on a punching bag, throwing fist after fist into it. Laura can practically feel his anger from across the room, radiating off of him in waves.

“You _asshole!”_ he cries, throwing an elbow at the bag. He’s starting to scream now, a punch in between words.“How _dare_ you! _You stupid vampire!”_

At first, Laura’s confused why he’s taking all this rage from Carmilla. She knows he’s mad at her, everybody is these days, but she never thought he was this mad.

“I _trusted_ you! You betrayed me! It’s your fault that she’s gone!”

That’s when it dawns on her. _Will._ He’s not yelling about Carmilla. He’s yelling about Will.

That’s when Laura begins to feel incredibly selfish. Kirsch’s best friend had betrayed him, tried to kill him, and played a massive role in the death of his girlfriend, and here he was comforting her while she whined and moped about the roommate that had saved her life, then ran off and broke her heart.

“Kirsch!” she calls. The punching stops as he turns around, his breathing ragged as he holds his fists up, a wild look in his eyes. It drops when he sees Laura. Then she’s running across the gym and throwing her arms around him.

“I’m sorry Kirsch,” she murmurs. “I’m so, so sorry.”

And for the first time, they’re both crying.

* * *

She can see Carmilla standing about twenty feet away. Just twenty short feet. She reaches out instinctively, reaching out for her, when a voice cries out _“Stop!”_

Laura turns around and there’s a girl there, with skin as pale as the white of her nightgown. _“Don’t,_ ” the girl whispers, and even though she’s right in front of her, her voice is distant, as if she were underwater. Laura knows this girl, knows she’s seen her somewhere before, but a takes a moment until she can place it, who this girl is.

_Ell._

_“Don’t!”_ she repeats, shouting now, and Laura’s caught between the warning and Carmilla. She’s so close, and she looks so pained, and Laura just wants to reach out and cup her cheek, as if she could erase it all with a single touch. It’s like Ell’s reading her mind, because she begins to shake her head, but the decision is already made.

She begins to run, and there’s nothing stops her. She throws herself into Carmilla, feeling the other girl’s arms wrap around her, and for a moment, she feels so calm. She feels safe and at peace, and she doesn’t know why Ell would warn her against Carmilla, against this, when the floor drops out from beneath them and suddenly, they’re falling.

Laura’s screaming when she shoots up in bed, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. Kirsch is at her side in a flash, wrapping his arms around her and trying to comfort her, but Laura isn’t screaming anymore.

She just feels numb.

* * *

Finally, eight days after her last video, Laura sits back down in front of the webcam.

“Hello, gentle viewers! Sorry, this video is so late,” Laura says, and even though she was still feeling particularly sober only moments before, she finds herself starting to grin a bit. It’s only been a few days and yet she’s managed to forget how much recording makes her feel better. “There’s been some… personal stuff going on, but I’m here now!”

The video’s routine, same as the rest of the videos she’s been posting as of late; funny stories, a surprise appearance from LaFontaine, and some general mindless chatter. However, the feeling of being back in front of the camera can’t stop the scratching in the back of her mind.

She’s about to close out the video, when she finally figures out what she wants to say and how to say it.

“And Carmilla?” she says, her voice dropping slightly as she leans in towards the laptop. “I don’t need you anymore.”

She posts that one with no hesitation.

* * *

She knows she’s probably fine, and the radio silence is most likely her fault, but she can’t stop herself from being a little worried for her safety. The checks have become more frequent, three or four times a day.

Finally, finally, she’s reaching her breaking point, ready to charge back into Silas just to check for herself, when there’s a new video on the site. It’s almost enough to know there’s a new video for her to be assured about Laura’s condition, but then her mind begins to wander, creating terrible awful realities and possibilities in her head; what it it’s a ransom video, or what if somebody knows she’s watching and has kidnapped Laura as bait? She’s clicking on the video before she can stop herself, and once Laura’s face appears on the screen, she can’t bring herself to pause it or look away, and she watches the entire video without blinking, all the way to the end.

_“I don’t need you anymore.”_

The sentence tings at her heart, and she can’t figure out whether she’s proud or upset. It’s both, she realizes, as the tears begin to flow down her face while she smiles.

She’s about to close her laptop for the night when she notices that the other tab open is trying to tell her she has a new e-mail., and of course, it’s from Laura.

_‘And I’ll date whomever I want.’_

She allows a tiny smirk as she reads the words, leaning back and resting her head on the yellow pillow.

“I’d expect nothing less,” she whispers to the empty room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha it's over. it's done forever.  
> lol joke. there's gunna be more. ( ; _ ; )  
> pls save me.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at the-cricket-song.tumblr.com


End file.
